Archive for December 6th, 2007

Before we go on to our usual Wednesday posts (Oricon charts), let’s look at how Johnnie To/Wai Ka-Fai’s Mad Detective is doing mid-week.

- On Tuesday discount day in Hong Kong, Mad Detective kept going strong with nearly HK$620,000 from 35 screens for a 6-day total of HK$5.01 million. With this pace and almost no competition this coming weekend, this could become the most successful Milkyway film since summer’s Hooked on You, and may even be Milkyway’s first film to hit the HK$10 million mark since the Election flicks. Everything else did not so well. Maybe more this weekend if now.com uploads the Thursday numbers.

-The Oricon charts were pretty quiet this week, with Tokio’s new single winning the top spot by selling just 46,000 copies. Erika Sawajiri, seemingly still trying to recover from her PR nightmare a few months ago, could only sell 26,000 copies of her latest single for a 7th place debut.

On the albums chart, Kazumasa Oda beats his own record by being the oldest artist to have a number 1 album with his latest, selling 176,000 copies in the first week.

- Yoshimitsu Morita’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Tsubaki Sanjuro might have debut at 4th place with just 160 million yen, but its opening was 54% of the opening for Yoji Yamada’s Love and Honor, which made a total of 4 billion yen. As for the audience breakdown, Eiga Consultant reports that the male-female ratio is 39:61 (!!!), those in their 40s made up 37.1 % of the audience, those in their 30s took up 22%, and those in their 20s took up just 17.2 %. Not sure how old those other 23.7% of the audience was, though.

When polled why they decided to watch it, 28.2% of the audience said it was because they were fans of star Yuji Oda, and 25.8% thought the content looked interesting. Period dramas such as Tsubaki Sanjuro tend to have stronger legs in the long run, so it looks like it will make it to 1 billion after all. It all depends on word-of-mouth, as is the case for most films in Japan that couldn’t open big.

- All Soi Cheang fans out there take note: his latest film Shamo, which has been stuck in limbo since it played at the Cannes market, is not likely to be released until March 2008, despite scoring 3 nominations at the Golden Horse Awards.